by Stanislas Jourdan | Jan 22, 2016 | News
British Member of Parliament Caroline Lucas, the only Green Party representative, tabled a motion which calls on the Government to commission research into basic income models. Now an unprecedented level of support is required to make it successful.
On Wednesday 20, MP Caroline Lucas tabled an Early Day Motion (EDM) “calling on the Government to fund and commission further research into the possibilities offered by the various Basic Income models, their feasibility, their potential to guarantee additional help for those who need it most, and how the complex economic and social challenges of introducing a Basic Income might be met.”
The EDM justifies the need for basic income by castigating the “evident inability of our bureaucratically costly social security system, with its dependence on means-testing and often arbitrary sanctions, to provide an adequate income floor.”
The motion goes on: “Basic Income, an unconditional, non-withdrawable income paid to everyone, has the potential to offer genuine social security to all while boosting entrepreneurialism and the creation of small businesses.”
Uncertain success
This is the first time that such a motion has been submitted to Parliament, and its potential for success in uncertain. Under the UK’s Parliamentary procedure, MPs can submit so-called Early Day Motions to provoke a debate in the House of Commons, but they need significant support from other MPs to win a full debate.
In practice, very few motions actually get debated in Parliament even if they do attract wide support, although they may contribute to triggering public interest and debate in the media. And even if an EDM does get a debate, legislation does not automatically follow. It can be, however, a very good way to test support for potential legislation.
The Green Party of England and Wales adopted basic income as a party policy last year, ahead of the last general election in May 2015. However Caroline Lucas herself, the only Green Party MP, was not very enthusiastic about the idea at the time, referring to it as “a longer term aspiration” rather than a strong electoral commitment.
The sight of how her constituents in Brighton are suffering due to increasing cuts in welfare benefits, and the arbitrary way sanctions are applied, seemed to have convinced her to fully back the policy.
“I’m not for a second pretending that shifting to basic income would be simple. But with a rapidly changing economy the Government should be urgently exploring ways to offer people the security they need. I hope that MPs from across the House of Commons will join me in calling for more research into this bold new policy,” Lucas said to the Independent.
An interesting challenge for the movement
Indeed Caroline Lucas’ motion will need unprecedented support in the political establishment to get a Parliamentary debate. As the UK Parliament website explains, “In an average session only six or seven EDMs reach over two hundred signatures. Around seventy or eighty get over one hundred signatures. The majority will attract only one or two signatures.” And even if there is wide support for the motion, a chamber debate is not guaranteed.
So far the motion has already been supported by 8 other MPs, 7 Scottish National Party members and one Labour MP.
Following international developments in Finland, Netherlands and Switzerland, the idea was recently endorsed by two prominent British think tanks, the Royal Society of Arts and Nesta. This triggered an unprecedented wave of media attention and the idea has started to gain credibility in British public opinion. This EDM is a great opportunity to gather wider support.
UK Parliamentary picture is reproduced with the permission of Parliament.
by Dejan Tachevski | Jan 2, 2016 | News
Basic Income is an idea that has been gaining popularity amongst Canadians. The Green Party has made basic income one of the most important planks of their platform, tying it to their anti-poverty efforts and elder care strategy.
Dubbing their “Guaranteed Livable Income” (GLI), the Greens would use “a single universal, unconditional cash benefit delivered through the tax system” to replace the current complex system of federal and provincial support.
In a recent article, Huffington Post Canada sat down with party leader Elizabeth May to discuss why providing a basic income to all Canadians would pay off for Canada. The interview provides valuable information about the reasons why she and other Greens believe that the “Guaranteed Livable Income” is the perfect anti-poverty measure.
For more information, read the whole article here: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/10/06/basic-income-canada-green-party-elizabeth-may_n_8246800.html
by Josh Martin | Jun 6, 2015 | News
Santens writes largely about electoral system issues in the U.S. and refutes the argument that Nader cost Gore the election in 2000. In fact, he argues that too many people didn’t vote for Nader, which would have impacted the presidency more. Nader, and the rest of the Green party, is a long-time supporter of basic income.
Scott Santens, “I Voted for Nader. Twice.” 4 November 2014.
by Josh Martin | May 1, 2015 | News
The Green Party of England and Wales received plenty of press over the past few months about their support of a basic income. While questions arose about whether they would keep basic income in their manifesto, they ultimately decided to keep it in their plans. Preparing for the general election on May 7th, the Green Party released their election manifesto and included a commitment to a basic income. Under the social security section of the manifesto, basic income is the first policy mentioned as the long-term plan of the Green Party, and it is included on the one-page executive summary at the front of the manifesto.
However, the Green Party admits that implementing a basic income in five years may be impractical and thus plans to conduct consultations and research on the basic income idea during a first parliament with the aim of implementation in a second parliament.
The Green Party released a basic income costing scheme alongside the manifesto, seeking to answer the major questions about funding a basic income in the UK.
The basic income rates they propose are the following: Child Benefit increased to £50 per week for all children, £80 per week for all citizens aged 18 to pension age, and a Citizen’s Pension rate of £155 per week for pensioners. They also add supplements of £80 per week for single parents and £25 per week for single pensioners. In total, this will cost £331 billion.
To fund this, the basic income replaces most means-tested benefits, totaling £163.767 billion, but notably keeps Housing Benefit and disability-related benefits. To fund the rest of the cost, the Green Party proposes abolishing personal income tax allowances, removing the primary and secondary thresholds for National Insurance contributions (NICs), eliminating Child and Working Tax Credits, and removing about 44% of the total of tax and National Insurance relief on pension contributions. These measures, partnered with savings on administration costs reach the desired £331 billion.
This basic income system essentially introduces a 32% taper rate (20% from income tax and 12% from NICs) on earned income under £31,785, at which point the income tax level would rise, moving the taper rate up to 52%. Further, a person under this system will need to earn about £13,000 before they pay more in tax and NICs than they receive in basic income. Comparing Universal Credit to this basic income scheme, people earning under £41,000 will gain from the switch to a basic income, equivalent to about four-fifths of taxpayers.
To learn more, check out the following links:
Green Party of England and Wales, “For the Common Good: General Election Manifesto 2015”, April 2015.
Green Party of England and Wales, “Basic Income: a detailed proposal”, Consultation Paper, April 2015.
by Toru Yamamori | Apr 17, 2015 | Opinion
Thanks to the Green Party of England and Wales, and the Scottish Green Party, a Citizen’s Income, a.k.a. a Basic Income, is now on the political agenda for the general election on 7th May 2015 in the U.K. This has expanded British media coverage on the topic dramatically.
An ITV opinion poll focused on Green Party includes a Citizen Income as one of 8 ‘possible future Government policies’ in its questionnaire. The poll shows: Support 36%; Oppose 40%; Don’t Know 23%. The ‘Don’t Know’ rate for a Citizen Income (23%) is lower than that of the following 4 policies: ‘Deliberately trying to reduce the size of the British economy in order to reduce the consumption of natural resources’ (37%), ‘Restricting the development of new supermarkets’ (26%), ‘Restricting the building of new football stadiums’ (33%), and ‘Seeking ways of reducing the size of the human population’ (28%). This suggests that people have a clearer opinion about a Citizen’s Income than the other 4 Greens’ polices listed above, regardless of whether that opinion is positive or negative.
So far so good. The Media reports the idea, and people have opinions about it. However, except a few voices its coverage either in the Media or anywhere else seldom touches on the fact that it has long been a demand of feminist activists in the U.K. It seems that even many feminists collectively have forgotten this historical fact. So let me briefly reclaim it.
In April 1977 at the 9th National Women’s Liberation Conference held in London, a resolution which asked the whole of the British Women’s Liberation movement to endorse a Guaranteed Minimum Income was passed with majority vote. Around 2.500-3,000 women were in attendance.
The resolution was raised by women from Claimants Unions, and by ‘a Guaranteed Minimum Income’ they meant an unconditional basic income, i.e. a Citizen’s Income. They have demanded and campaigned for it since 1970.
Who were these women? Why did they demand a Citizen’s Income? Julia Mainwaring, one of those who spoke for the resolution at the conference, recalls that it ‘came to us from personal experience, [from experiences of] all of us.’ She was born and grew up in a small mining village in Wales, where almost all of the adults in the village were unemployed. She moved to Birmingham and with several other people she founded the first ‘Claimants Union’ in 1968. They defined it as ‘trade union of assistance claimants’. Within a year more than 150 people had joined this union, and in a few years around 90 Claimants Unions were formed in many cities and towns across the U.K. Mainwaring herself moved to London. Until the early 1970s, council housing in London, provided either by the GLC or by the local borough, didn’t allow the name of legally married women to be entered into a rent book which could only be held in the husband’s name. Mainwaring challenged this in court and won her case. (Photo 1 shows a recent picture of Mainwaring with a photo of her on the day she won the case.)
Not only Mainwaring, but also many of the women in Claimants Unions came from a Working Class background and many were single mothers. They were regularly harassed by welfare officers, referred to as ‘sex snoopers’, who spied on them and conducted spot checks late at night. If a claimants woman had any sexual relationship with a man, it was assumed they should be supported by him. Sometimes just friendship for example, a male neighbour coming into the house to help fix a tap or a bulb would be assumed to be a partner/boyfriend; the next week her benefit would be suspended. The women didn’t take this personally, rather they detected the structural and institutionalised sexism behind. In order to end this, they formulated the idea of a Citizen’s Income, where no means test was involved so that no spies and no humiliation were needed.
The same sexism still continues, if its brutality has slightly decreased since 1970s. If you don’t detect anything wrong after watching this govermental video; you share the same sexist assumption with DWP that if a woman accommodates her boyfriend and irons his cloths, she must be financially supported by him.
So it seems to me the Claimants Union women’s struggle against institutionalised sexism and their feminist rationale for a Citizen’s Income is still relevant to contemporary progressive politics in the U.K. However, strangely enough, both the literature on feminism and on a citizen’s income in this country have been silent about this feminist struggle and its demand. Why has this feminist demand which was officially and democratically endorsed as one of demands of the British Women’s Liberation movement erased from the collective memory of British feminists?
I restrict myself by not speculating about the reason here. Instead let me briefly juxtapose claimants women’s own voices with the representations of them in a Women’s Liberation poster and Spare Rib articles. Issue no. 4 of Spare Rib (1972) showed a photo of claimants in protest along with text which explained the detail of the protest (The left of Photo 2). The same photo was reused for a poster for International Women’s Day in 1973, but its detail had been edited (The right of Photo 2); Men were deleted. A slogan on the placard carried by a woman was changed from “End Cohabitation Rule” to “Equal Pay” and some other demands. The name of organisation on the placard was changed from “Claimants Union” to “Women’s Liberation Workshop.” I imagine there was no sinister motive for this editing. (But it would misguide a younger generation of feminist historians.)
Many claimants women joined the protest in London at the International Women’s Day 1973. Lyn Boyd and Rosemary Robson, both from Newcastle Claimants Union were arrested when they and others took action to protest against the government’s plan to abolish Family Allowance and to replace it by Tax Credit. (Photo 3: Robson on the left; Boyd on the right. ) Family Allowance was paid to women, but Tax Credit was supposed to be paid to men. The claimants women thought a Citizen’s Income was a necessary condition for the financial independence of women (which was the ‘fifth demand’ of the British Women’s Liberation Movement) and defending and expanding Family Allowance was a first step toward it.
Boyd was born in a mining community in North Durham. She described Claimants Union activity as empowering themselves ‘to be knowledgeable enough to stand up for yourself and fight for your rights on a basis of equals not “cap in hand”.’ Through her involvement with the Claimants Union, she joined the Women’s Liberation Movement. Boyd, Robson and other claimants women hitchhiked to the Women’s Liberation conferences in London and elsewhere. Boyd recalls that they had sought ‘a better way of living and cooperating – the claimants union and women’s rights movementis a manifestation of that way of being’.
Five years later, Issue no. 58 of Spare Rib (1977) reported that a resolution demanding a “Guaranteed Minimum Income” was passed at a National Women’s Liberation Conference. Strangely, while the article didn’t tell readers anything about what a “Guaranteed Minimum Income” is, who raised the resolution and why they did so, but instead, it reported who was against it and the reasons for their opposition.
What do Mainwaring, Boyd, Robson and the other women in the Claimants Unions think are the reasons for the collective amnesia in feminism and in progressive politics more generally? And how did their thoughts and actions relate to feminism more generally speaking? Some of their voices are recorded in the following article: ‘A Feminist Way to Unconditional Basic Income: Claimants Unions and Women’s Liberation Movements in 1970s Britain’, Basic Income Studies, 9(1-2), 2014, pp.1-24. An earlier and longer version of it can be read here.
A Citizen’s Income is needed to end one of institutionalised forms of sexism today. That I have learnt from these women.
